I started another dishcloth because they are simple and I can sometimes work on them while reading (the more complex bits of the book I have to put it down for). I'm using smaller needles on this one - the first one I used 5 1/2 mm needles, this one I am using a set of 4 mms. So it will be smaller but have a tighter gauge, which might make it better for washing glasses or something. (I have a few drinking glasses that I hand wash, because they have screened designs that will wear off in the dishwasher)
This is one of the balls of yarn that came from Herrschner's; I kind of had to take what they had, apparently they had a run on this like lots of places had on craft supplies. This is Sugar and Cream - made in Canada of, it says, US cotton, so you wouldn't expect sourcing problems to be due to import issues.
Again: it's a simple pattern but it works up into a useful thing - and sometimes simple is good.
I'm also working a bit on the horse pillowcases. Mom-horse is completely done down to the buckle on her halter; I started on her foal. (I think the second pillow case I will do the foal first, and then mom - and be careful to keep the right skein of floss out with it - and THEN do the vines and flowers last).
And I pulled out a pair of socks that....well, they make me slightly sad because I remember I last worked on them at Christmas 2018, when my dad was still around, and also, in the planning stages I posted the yarn on Twitter and Charles Hill made a favorable comment on it.
Sometimes a good memory is a bit of a curse.
Anyway - I had got as far as the heel flap in 2018 and that's where I picked up with them:
Heel flap is done, heel turned, gussets picked up and gusset decreases begun. These move a little slowly because there's a slipped-stitch pattern on the leg and instep
They're called Stroopwaffel socks; the stroopwaffels on them are made with purl stitches (the bumps) and slipped stitches - so there's a pattern to keep track of and you're moving the yarn back to front to make the purls, and back again to go back to plain knitting, and that takes longer. But it's a cute pattern.
And the heel - this is a new and different way of doing a slipped-stitch heel flap (slipping with yarn in front) and it looks kind of neat:
I'll probably work more on these this weekend; I'm contemplating taking Saturday off from continuing-ed reading and watching a marathon of old "Murder, She Wrote"s as an escape. Some episodes have not aged....terribly well....and yet, it also reminds me of what the world was like back in the 1980s, when I was young. And I do enjoy Jessica Fletcher, her quiet firm sense of what's right.
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And yeah, I want an escape. There are many terrible things that have happened in the world. and expanding ripples of reactions to those terrible things. And I feel - and this is one of the things I admit I hate about social media - I don't really have anything to SAY about it that makes any sense because I'm just a stupid privileged white woman who doesn't really have any claim on the suffering involved or knowledge of the exact situations. And yet - and this is the part I hate about social media - some people in similar positions to me are fundamentally saying "if you're not out there tearing your clothes and beating your chest about how terrible you are, you are siding with the fascists" and it feels like a....well, that escalated quickly. Yes, it's terrible. Yes, I have opinions. But none of my opinions add any light or wisdom to the situation, so I would rather let other people speak.
I will say I feel often like an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. And militarizing the police, giving them more and more armored stuff and advanced weapons is a problem in many places.
But humanity is exhausting and as I have said on Twitter: I am not entirely convinced I want to go back out into that terrible world once it's safe because there's a vaccine.
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(One tiny incident: I picked up barbecue from the good local place for dinner tonight. They were super busy and doing their best, but my order wasn't quite ready - the young woman working the window apologetically said they'd had 20 orders come in in the past 10 minutes or so - and would I please pull forward and she indicated where I could wait. So I did. And the guy behind me, who got his stuff first, apparently didn't like that he had to carefully pull out past me, and mouthed something that I think was not-nice (I had my windows rolled up) and made a rude gesture as he passed and really? Was that necessary?
Two minutes later I had my stuff (and yes, I thanked the person who brought it out to me) but....it seems like in recent weeks, I've had a much higher proportion of unpleasant in-person interactions than I remember in the past, and because I have SO FEW in-person interactions now (I generally don't leave my house/yard more than once a week or so), they loom very large in my mind.
Maybe I'm too sensitive. People have told me that all my life and it's probably true. But also: I think some people are too impatient, too rude, to prone to see others as roadblocks to their happiness. I don't know what the answer is. I can't be like that, I know - I have a hard time expressing anger even to people who might deserve it.
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A palate cleanser - it's Bored Panda, so if for some reason you don't like that site or its parent site, don't bother to click, but: 40 cases of pets looking lovingly at their people and really, maybe cats and dogs are better than the rest of us. I think my favorites are #1, #5 (the man with his cat on the bus), and #24 (the "chicken wing loaf" but also a cat-smile).
Of course I am partisan to cats. Dogs can be very nice too, but cats are my favorite of the two.
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